Art Spiegelman Draws Me a Picture

I remember seeing Maus for the first time sometime during my early adolescence. My revered older cousin John was reading it, and I was intrigued instantly. I've read it several times since then, once with a high school English class, and it has yet to lose its intrigue. Allow me to enlighten the confused among you: Maus is a graphic novel drawn (written?) by Art Spiegelman about his father's experiences during the Holocaust. Vladek and Spiegelman's mother, Anja, were born in Warsaw and lived through the ghettos and the concentration camps, finally moving to America, where Art was born. The event at the 92nd Street Y coincided with the release of Metamaus, a book about the creation of Maus. Hillary Chute, a college professor who looked too young to have accomplished anything of merit (yet more evidence that looks can be deceiving), put the book together with help from Spiegelman to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first volume of Maus's publication. Chute began the work as a graduate student, apparently, and she and Spiegelman interacted with the intimacy of two people who have spent a lot of time, not all of it entirely pleasant, together. Spiegelman's remaining hair was sprinkled with white and combed straight back. He was slightly stooped, but his face was sharp, alert, and tan. He wore a sweater vest under his suit and thick glasses.

The conversation between the two was one of the best events I've attended at the Y. Chute asked Spiegelman a series of questions against the backdrop of a PowerPoint presentation she'd put together, and I was found myself far more fascinated by Spiegelman's history and the creation of the book than I expected to be. Spiegelman said that, though it happened decades before his birth, his life really began on Kristallnacht. He reportedly majored in sex and drugs in college, but found that Maus helped him confront rather than escape his ghosts and his father's life in a harrowing but valuable way. He found that he understood his father's perspective when he began to draw his Vladek's life.

Spiegelman interviews Vladek

One question he is asked a lot (and which I have wondered about a lot myself) is why he chose this format to tell his father's story. Obviously, as a cartoonist, it seems natural. But more than that, he felt that a graphic novel (I flatly refuse to call Maus a "comic book," even though that's what Spiegelman calls it) was a way to speak of the unspeakable. Aside from colorful covers (above and right), his drawings are black and white and appear simple, like something you could scratch out on a scrap of paper in the candle light of a crowded ghetto apartment or concentration camp bunk. (Spiegelman said he wanted Maus to feel like looking in someone's journal; there were lots of clandestine artists in the camps.) But the images are anything but simple. For example, he told a fascinating story about his father's denial that there was an orchestra at Auschwitz. Vladek did not remember one, yet Spiegelman insisted it was a well-documented fact. Figuring his father had never been to that part of the huge camp, Spiegelman mostly obscures the orchestra in the frame that shows his father's memory of marching in Auschwitz. But the building in the background, directly behind the barely-visible orchestra, is the only one made of boards in the frame, and the lines in the boards represent the lines of a musical staff used in sheet music. WOW. I've read this book several times, and I have to confess that detail escaped my notice.

Spiegelman spent a lot of time talking about deciding which format to use for drawing the mice, which was interesting. He ended up deciding on a stripped down version, one that is not overly emotional, which I appreciate. The figures do not feel melodramatic, which is fitting; the events in the book are so dramatic that it would feel like overkill. This allows the reader to add his/her own interpretation, which is much more powerful. The animal faces seem almost like masks, and Spiegelman said that he intended them to be foils. The Germans, obviously, are cats, and Poles are drawn as pigs, because, as Spiegelman says, they are not kosher animals. And the Americans, who beat the Germans in the end, are dogs.

One of the most moving parts of the evening was when we got to listen to a clip of an interview with Vladek. A CD with hours of interviews is included with Metamaus, and it was fascinating to hear Vladek speaking words I'd read several times in the book, in his thick accent and slightly ungrammatical English. I was struck by the matter-of-fact tone in which Vladek discussed a series of horrific events that happened to Anja's family. I suppose, to him, they were just a part of life at that point.

Of course, I was thrilled to have another signed book for my collection, but I was beyond thrilled when Spiegelman signed my book like this:

Great insights from a great man, and a great souvenir to show for it! Not bad for a night's work.